X-rays

He had prepared a cardboard screen painted with
barium platinocyanide so it would fluoresce,

and he it noticed shimmering when he allowed an electrical
discharge to flow through the tubes.

In testing the opacity of different materials he
moved a piece of lead into the path of the ray

and he saw the skeleton of his own hand, holding the dark
piece of lead, on the fluorescent screen.

He realized that he was seeing a new kind of ray
that could go through opaque materials

and he called it X-radiation because X in mathematical
expressions typically represents the unknown.

X-ray vision

Superman sees through objects

with his X-ray vision.

How he does this

is a matter of poetic license.

Neutrino rays even finer than X-rays

stream through everything we see

but the retinal cells in normal eyes

are not fine enough to discern them.

Assertions about radiotherapy

What can kill may be killed.

What can kill may heal.

What can heal may kill.

The fact that X-rays were a form of electromagnetic
radiation of a wavelength comparable to the distance between atoms
in a crystal was not shown until 1912.

Röntgen did not try to patent the use of X-rays for
medical imaging but said that he preferred that it benefit mankind
as a whole. He gave the money for the first Nobel prize in physics
to University of Wurzburg. Röntgen did not want X-rays named
after himself, as they are today in many languages.

I am not a good one to talk to about trying to kill cancer
with radiation. Maybe the good of the whole compensates for
individual tragedies.